The Statistics Initiative is named after Professor Diego de Castro, former leading figure of the Department of Statistics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Torino. It is hosted at the Collegio and promotes and coordinates its scientific activities in Statistics and related areas in collaboration with the University of Torino.Current research topics include statistical theory and computational methods, with special focus on Bayesian modeling, optimization, randomized and distributed algorithms, as well as applications to economics, econometrics, biology, statistical physics, genomics, ecology and survival analysis.